Stop[s]—docile and omnipotent.” The iambic flow is broken with the stress of “Stop.” This is another example of how Dickinson introduces idiosyncrasies to signal meaning. The poem and the train within the poem come to a “Stop” at the same time, and readers experience that stop because of how disruptive the very word is. The poem concludes when the train finally arrives “docile and omnipotent / At its own stable door.” The stable door neatly ties up the conceit of the train as horse, while the pair of adjectives—“docile and omnipotent”—captures the train’s contrary spirit. As a machine, it is at once immensely powerful and entirely manipulable. All told, the speaker’s tone is one of approval; as she says of the train in the opening line, “I like to see it.”

Introduction

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) composed “I like to see it lap the Miles,” or “The Railway Train”, at some date between 1858 and 1862. She included it in a bundle of poems she mailed to Thomas Higginson, her literary mentor, in 1862. Like the vast majority of her writings, “The Railway Train” was never published during her lifetime. It was eventually collected in the multi-volume series of her poetry that Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd edited and released in the 1890s. Higginson and Todd named the poem “The Railway Train,” an example of the succinct titles they gave to Dickinson’s poems before publication.

The poem’s guiding conceit compares the train to a horse. This metaphor makes sense, given that the horse was the prevailing mode of transportation until the train came to prominence in the mid 19th century. For Dickinson and her contemporaries, the horse would have been the surest frame of reference for understanding the train. “The Railway Train” is comprised of four stanzas that follow a loose ABAB rhyme scheme in common meter, an alternation between tetrameter and trimeter that Dickinson used more often than any other metrical pattern.

Summary of the Poem

In the opening stanza, Dickinson describes the train’s movement as “lap[ping] the Miles.” This image figures the railway as one stretch in a looping horse track. The train “lick[ing] the Valleys up” and “feed[ing] itself at Tanks” further envisions the train’s actions in terms of those of a horse. The phrase “prodigious step” employs the adjective “prodigious” as an adverb for the verb “step”—a technique Dickinson often used. It may be that Dickinson chose “prodigious” instead of “prodigiously” in order to preserve the line’s iambic locomotion. Furthermore, the word suggests that the train itself is portentous, hinting at the future order of things.

In the second stanza, the train moves “around a Pile of Mountains”—a metaphor that emphasizes the train’s strength and scale by demoting a range of mountains to a diminutive “Pile.” A similar effect appears when the train “supercilious peer[s] / In Shanties.” The train’s contemptuous gaze at the rough-hewn shacks by the side of the track suggests its pride in its own newness and powerful construction compared to the primitive products of past hands.

In the transition from stanzas two to three, Dickinson develops the unusual image of the train “a Quarry par[ing] / To fit its Ribs / And crawl between.” Presumably the train tracks pass through a stone quarry. The quarry presses so close to the tracks that the train must—in a further equine metaphor—narrowly “fit its Ribs / And crawl between.” These first two lines of the third stanza are really a single line split in two, for their two pairs of stresses combine to form the expected tetrameter line. Dickinson’s split mimics the narrowing action of the train’s squeezing through the quarry pass. The train then lets out a whistle, which Dickinson imagines as both a complaint and a poem: “horrid—hooting stanza.”

In the fourth stanza, the train “neigh[s] like Boanerges,” a simile that sustains the horse conceit and brings in an allusion to the biblical New Testament. Jesus gives James and John the surname “Boanerges,” a Greek word from Hebrew roots that means “sons of thunder.” The word’s etymology conveys the sound of the train’s thunderous whistle. At the same time, the word’s common meaning—a fiery preacher in the vein of James and John—sustains on the prior stanza’s metaphor of the whistle as oration. The final lines introduce the only major metrical aberration in the poem. The train “then—punctual as a star / Stop[s]—docile and omnipotent.” The iambic flow is broken with the stress of “Stop.” This is another example of how Dickinson introduces idiosyncrasies to signal meaning. The poem and the train within the poem come to a “Stop” at the same time, and readers experience that stop because of how disruptive the very word is. The poem concludes when the train finally arrives “docile and omnipotent / At its own stable door.” The stable door neatly ties up the conceit of the train as horse, while the pair of adjectives—“docile and omnipotent”—captures the train’s contrary spirit. As a machine, it is at once immensely powerful and entirely manipulable. All told, the speaker’s tone is one of approval; as she says of the train in the opening line, “I like to see it.”